When immigrants from Ireland and England came to this country and called it home, they brought along their dogs. Their canines were an assortment of crosses between terriers and old style bulldogs (taller and leggier) who’d been used by butchers to corner and hold cattle. Later on, and in what became a display of the cruelty of human beings, these dogs were recruited to fight each other for sport. In America, the bull and terriers crosses (now called Bull and Terriers), originally worked on farms, but sadly, fighting rings appeared, as well.

When a registry for these dogs was created in the United Kennel Club in 1898, they were called American Pit Bull Terriers (the name by which they are still known in the UKC) but people who sought to register their dogs with the AKC in the early 1920s wanted to distance their dogs from the fighting world. It took until 1936 to approve a standard, and the breed was then named the Staffordshire Terrier. As it happened, that same year the English Kennel Club accepted the Staffordshire Bull Terrier. When the AKC accepted the Staffordshire Bull Terrier in 1972, the Staffordshire Terrier’s name was changed to the American Staffordshire Terrier to avoid confusion.

Though these two breeds have common origins, their respective breed standards show their differences. Two of them are weight and size. A male American Staffordshire (or AmStaff) can weigh almost twice as much as a Staffordshire Bull Terrier; in size, the biggest Staffordshire Bull Terrier is the size of the smallest Am Staff. Color, too, is a difference. An Am Staff can be any color except for white (80% max.), while a Staffie is limited to red, fawn, white, black or blue, or any of these colors with white. Another noticeable difference is in their heads.The Staffordshire Bull Terrier has a short skull, the American Staffordshire has a medium length skull.

Each is a terrific breed, but other than both being canines with a shared root in the first type of Bulldog, and having “Staffordshire” in their names (in reference to an area where the dogs were very popular), they are not the same breed. Now that we’ve shared a few differences, can you tell which breed is which in our image?

Images: American Staffordshire Terrier, Zican’s Bz Ez Dragon by Svenska Mässan is at the right and is shared through a CC BY 2.0 license. The dog at the left is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and was found on Pinterest, credit happily given upon receipt of information.